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Global Economic Fellows’ Projects on Education, Innovation and Media

Roundtable

This roundtable offers selected Global Economic Fellows a platform for a brief presentation of their projects and discussion with an expert and the audience. The discussion focuses on the projects’ contribution to global problem solving and how they implement a solution for a specific global problem.

Based on the selected projects, the roundtable discussion will address two main topics:

the GES 2012 highlighted issue "Growth through Education and Innovation" and

"Using media and ICT to protect vulnerable populations".

Global Economic FellowsThomas Baden’s project aims to promote higher education in the developing world by tackling education inequality. The idea is to fill the lack of highly trained personnel at universities in developing countries with the vast teaching potential of young western academics, graduating from top universities, in all areas of higher education. A first successful neuroscience teaching project, with a small group of young academics, has been launched at Kampala International University, Uganda.

Simon Quinn’s project centers on the importance of entrepreneurship for growth and development. The project is meant to provide new insights into the way that African manufacturing firms operate. Therefore the Aspire Business Ideas Competition was run, in different African cities, in which young African entrepreneurs presented their ideas to established African business leaders. They therewith hope to find valuable new ideas and suggestions for development policy around the world.

C. Muthoni Muriithi’s project addresses the use of media to highlight the problem of violence against women, since it prevents women from participating in the political social, economic and cultural development. An online platform is being created to map out services to survivors while empowering women and girls to actively engage in the protection of their rights and ensuring that government, as the protector and service provider, actively responds to their demands.

Will Snell’s project targets to change behaviors and save lives in developing countries with the use of mass media campaigns. The focus is on reducing child mortality. Will and the Development Media International have developed a model that allows predicting, monitoring and evaluating the impacts of these mass media campaigns in terms of lives saved. It also shows that this approach is the most cost-effective and scalable method that is currently available to reduce child deaths.